Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday July 01, 2011 @03:05AM
from the and-you-don't-have-to-buy-hats dept.

Following up on news from earlier this week that Valve made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play, we now get word that the Source engine SDK will be free to all as well. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"The Source Software Development Kit, for those of you who've never clicked the Tools tab in Steam, contains everything you'd need to make a mod, except for personal ambition. It has everything from the infamous Valve Hammer Editor to Face Posers and Model Viewers. At the moment, to gain access to the Source SDK you have to purchase a Source based game such as Half Life 2, or as the official website states, Team Fortress 2. Which is of course now free. [Valve's Robin Walker said], 'We are in the process of getting it all done. It’s a bit messy because we have multiple versions of the SDK, and there’s some dependencies we need to shake out. But yes, the gist of it is that we’re just going to go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available.'"

How much would it cost to release a port of Source to Linux? Come up with a figure, and we - the Linux gaming community, who bought every iD game ever written simply because it had Linux support straight away - will come up with the cash.

Some of us do play games, there is more than enough people out there playing the open source ones (mainly because there are hardly any commercial ones, modern games to say the least...).

Another thing to point out is that linux users (on average) were the ones willing to pay a higher price for the games available from the humble indie bundle game packs. Valve should jump the gun and test drive some sales with a game or two, it could really benefit them (aswell as improving the chance of other publishers port

Where are you getting $15 from? I expect it would cost a bit more to release a Linux port than that, but if that's all it takes they can have the money now. At current exchange rates, that's the price of a bacon roll and a cup of tea from the burger van outside.

If Steam was available for Linux, and games could run natively or via wine, I'd lose the last major reason I have a copy of Windows. I'm sure I'm not the only one using Windows solely for gaming, and I'd love to be able to ditch it entirely for Linux.

If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs.
I for one would gladly pitch in making source-games for linux if I had the chance:D
(Tux -something something- FPS here I come ! )

>>If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs

Well... the entire HL2 source code was leaked back in the day... =)

But I'd love to see the *TF2* source code released. Robin (back when he was just a uni student in Australia) released the source code to TF1 (up to a certain version), which enabled me to write CustomTF (I guess some people call it Shaka's Mod) which allows you to build your own class using a cash-based system. Hell of a lot of fun to write and play, and it turned into an open source project in its own right, with various people from around the world taking over leadership of the project at one point or another in the last 14 years.

>>If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs

Well... the entire HL2 source code was leaked back in the day... =)

But I'd love to see the *TF2* source code released. Robin (back when he was just a uni student in Australia) released the source code to TF1 (up to a certain version), which enabled me to write CustomTF (I guess some people call it Shaka's Mod) which allows you to build your own class using a cash-based system. Hell of a lot of fun to write and play, and it turned into an open source project in its own right, with various people from around the world taking over leadership of the project at one point or another in the last 14 years.

Given that the Orange Box 2009 engine is the basis of most of Valve's current online games, it's doubtful that would happen. The closest you're going to get is the Alien Swarm code.

Even server plugins like MetaMod: Source and Orange Box are reverse engineering the server constructs to do a lot of what they do, as Valve is terrible at keeping the HL2 SDK for VSPs (Valve Server Plugins) up to date.

Any story about a hypothetic Linux release of the SDK on Slashdot would immediately turn into an immature flamewar about it using the wrong license and being proprietary. I can see why any sane company would want to avoid "attracting" such user base.

If you mean Loki Software the problem wasn't that no one bought them. The problems was corporate mismanagement. When you buy 100,000 ( or whatever the insane number reported was) metal tins for Quake 3 for a Linux release when none of your other games have sold anywhere near that amount, you know you have a serious management problem. When you pay way too much for the license and make all kinds of weird and strange deals with the game companies, you are going to have problems. Loki ported 19 games over abou

do you remember a company that ported some Windows games into Linux in late '90? Many nerds bought that games (I was one of them)...

Loki Games, indeed I do remember them, and they ported one of my favorite games of all time Tribes 2 to Linux. Back in 2003 when I was using Redhat 9 majority of the time instead of Windows 2000 I wanted to play that game natively in Linux (WINE wasn't that great back then for games) and couldn't find anybody who sold it, until Tux Games made an announcement they received a limited resupply from a warehouse that wanted to get rid of the existing stock of them.

How interesting: It's software, it's free, and it's name Source, but it's not Free Software or Open Source. It's really a shame that with the thousands of words in the English language neither RMS nor Valve could come up with something more identifying.

How interesting: It's software, it's free, and it's name Source, but it's not Free Software or Open Source. It's really a shame that with the thousands of words in the English language neither RMS nor Valve could come up with something more identifying.

After reading ^this, the only thing I think fits and that popped into my mind is: " but... does the Source itself want to be free?"

As I understand it, the name was more or less an accident... at the time they first started showing off the engine "Source" was the name of the engine in their version control system. Why they decided to keep with that name instead of coming up with a new one is likely lost to time.

And they rechristened the HL1 engine "GoldSrc" (because that version had gone gold) to differentiate between the two.

When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life 1 (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both $/Goldsrc and/$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck.

You could try using an OS that isn't virtually insignificant in the user desktop market. A market that developers look at and fear virtually no returns on their invesetment. A few potentially loyal sales doesn't really make a sound investment. Almost posted this AC but I'll take the karma hit if it comes. I shouldn't need to hide to post the truth.

I'll take the hit, I got more karma than God and therefor don't give a crap. unless you are a programmer Linux is COMPLETELY pointless. Its driver model is more than a decade behind everyone else which causes drivers to shit themselves with regularity, Hardware support for cutting edge? Fugetaboutit and for everything less than 3 years old spotty at best, Low resource? not since Ubuntu came along and frankly if you really cared about that TinyXP runs great on a 400MHz and uses just 64Mb of RAM for a full de

Hey look everybody it is Alex a KNOWN DOUCHEBAG! See how easy that is to make insults, especially when one has NO DEFENSE to what is being written? I love how the average Linux users acts like a 8 year old going "Nigger faggot" to everyone that doesn't kiss his ass, only instead of nigger and faggot it is shill and astroturfer.

For your info Mr Douche, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...I'm a retailer. I actually have REAL WORLD CUSTOMERS not some kids in their basements trying to stick it to "teh man". I ha

Riiight. Hey douchey, citation please? Someone must have forgotten to tell me where Ballmer parked the money truck. Hell I don't even get discount licensing I buy OEM boxes off Newegg like every other system builder.

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos [theinquirer.net] even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linus shits itself and dies if you use the d

See? Thanks for proving you are a coward as I conclusively proved, with link after link no less, that your driver model is shit, retailers consider your product about as useful as an STD, and your ONLY answer? The ONLY thing you can come up with? Waaaah, he won't suck Linus' cock so he must work for M$! Wahhh!

Hell I even provided a link showing from the mouth of Linus himself that his "big plan" for the kernel is THERE IS NO PLAN just whatever itch he and his douchey kernel buds feel like, like it is 1993 a

And here is what happens when Microsoft marketing people are out of their talking points -- their monkeys are allowed to build the "arguments" themselves. This is how hairyfeet sounds when he doesn't have any copy to paste.

Are you nagging about "hardware support for cutting edge"? No, really? You do realize that this all depends on the manufacturers being retards and not releasing specifications, right? When the BIOS is based on hacks to make Wind-Blows work, and when manufacturers prefer to keep their specifications to themselves, or only share it with microsoft retards, we can't do shit. Do you think programmers shit out specifications for a new hardware that they just bought? Do you realize how hard it is to reverse-engine

Valve has discovered that they're making more money from their cut of the thousands of non-Valve games on Steam than from the few dozen Valve games. It's why they can so frequently give away their games for free. It's why they can dump a fortune into developing Portal, which while clearly the worlds best puzzle game, offers little replayability.

I'd expect the Source SDK licenses will require that games are sold only on Steam.

They recently announced that Portal 2 hit sales of 3 million units. At $49.99 a pop, that only gives them $150 million in just a few months time. I think that'll float their boat for awhile.

I wonder if they're sort of feeling sorry for selling a 10 hour game for such a high price. (Mind you, it is a very worthy game and fairly evenly paced - once you start thinking, what?! another test room? they move you out of it.)

Portal and Portal 2 are truly exceptional games however. There are many people intentionally waiting until Portal 2 drops in price though.

As I understand it, they had serious difficulties working more than two portal pairs into the physics engine. I'd imagine that'll get fixed eventually, paving the way for competitive portal games. Imagine Atlas and P-body in cowboy hats trying to round up escaping armed humans.

Since they're removing the "must have a copy of a Source game" requirement from the SDK license, it could very well mean that we can finally redistribute the code. Because of that requirement, mods couldn't even be "visible source", but now that they can (presumably), there's no reason it can't be put on GitHub. Someone putting the code on there would be a big help to developers, actually, to already have a starting point in a code repository.

Alien swaem has been free for a while and if you own any ATI or nvidia card you've been able to get half life 2 deathmatch and half life 2 lost cost free (the nvidia version of the offer also includes a demo of portal and another game i've never heard of) too though this isn't widely advertised (I found the page below while reading up on half life modding). There was also a free portal offer a while back.

Alien Swarm which you mentioned, also got you the SDK, so a free Source SDK is old news.
Not that it's any good being a terrible engine, terrible pipelines, no elegance, still using.qc files to compile assets, etc...

The BUILD editor wasn't free in 1996. You had to buy a BUILD-based game (ie. DN3D or Shadow Warrior) in order to use it. Which is more or less exactly the same thing Valve did, in their release time (since there was no HL2 in 1996).

The Source SDK being now free, everyone has now access to the mods in this list [wikipedia.org], most of them being free (Zombie Panic! Source, Age of Chivalry, Insurgency...) or not costing much (Garry's Mod).
I guess they are planning to get more well-know given their projects (DOTA 2 especially)

I can see how the Hammer editor is cumbersome or missing a feature or two in places, but I seem to do pretty well building my future "dream" houses and walking around in it. Are there other, better solutions to use than the Hammer editor for Source games? (I am curious as to what they may update with this release.)